CORDIS

Despite the low energy performances of the European building stock, the yearly renovation rate is around 1,2%, and the choice to perform a building deep renovation is strongly affected by uncertainties in terms of costs and performance benefits in the life cycle. The project 4RinEU faces these challenges, offering robust technology solutions and strategies to encourage the existing building stock transformation, fostering the use of renewable energies, and providing reliable business models to support a deep renovation decision process.
4RinEU project minimizes risks and failures in design and implementation, manages different stages of the deep renovation process - from the preliminary audit up to the end-of-life - and provides useful information on investment performance to the stakeholders.

The 4RinEU deep renovation strategy is based on 3 pillars:
- robust technologies enabling a cost reduction in the life cycle;
- usable methodologies encouraging players’ involvement and ensuring the reduction of the renovation time;
- reliable business models to enhance the level of confidence of deep renovation investors.

4RinEU results are expected to generate significant impacts: energy savings, reduction of renovation time and costs, improvement of occupants IEQ conditions, optimization of RES use, acceleration of EU residential building renovation rate. This will bring a revitalization of the EU construction sectors, making renovation easier, quicker and more sustainable.

The 4RinEU’s strategy is aimed to support the investors from concept to the operative phase to end-of-life management of the building renovation. The main objective of the technologies is to reduce energy demand, to improve energy efficiency, and finally, to reduce the construction waste. The methodologies are aimed to support the stakeholders along the whole renovation process, helping to understand renovation issues and associated potentials, to ensure an effective and participated design, to manage the construction site and reduce the working time and the associated failures. Finally, the business models will drive the investors in deep renovation, supporting them to identify the risks of the deep renovation process and enable well-founded investments supported by tailor-made financial tools.

This second reporting covered the “core part” of the whole action. Technology solutions and business models have been almost completed, and the retrofitting packages reached a good level of advancement. Furthermore, one demo case was retrofitted and started the post-monitoring, while the other two are ready to kick-off.
The 4RinEU technologies have been prototyped, tested and released for the demo-cases. In particular, the Prefabricated Multifunctional Façade, ceiling fan control algorithm and Early RENo tool have been almost finalised, providing strategic inputs for the the renovation packages in the demo cases. The development of the Plug and Play Energy Hub is also ongoing and the prototypes will be tested in EURAC premises for fine-tuning the design, for the production of first industrial series. In addition, the developed Sensible Building Data Handler (SBDH), including both the Audit App and the Dashboard – that is also under finalization – is demonstrating its potential as useful and usable tool directly applicable in the demo cases. The protocol for management of deep renovation has been finalized.
Coupled with the technical development, a detailed performance characterization of the 4RinEU technologies combined in the deep renovation packages has been carried out while the impact on the 4RinEU KPIs is under evaluation for the residential archetypes in the six EU geo-clusters. This work represents the basis for the cost-effective rating tool and will be used for the comparison of the renovation packages.
Concerning the demonstration activities, in the Norwegian demo-case works implementation works were carried out between June and August 2018, and afterwards all the efforts were focused on the installation of the post-monitoring infrastructure and data gathering of construction process. In the other two demo- cases (in Spain and Netherland) the detailed design has been completed and the implementation will start as soon as the tendering procurement procedure will be completed.
The activities related to the exploitation have been mainly focused on the characterization value proposition of the exploitable results (ERs). Furthermore, market analysis in the field of building deep renovations have been performed, as well as assessment to map the stakeholders, detailing their elements of interest and possible opportunities respect the project outcomes.
Finally, the communication and dissemination activities are gaining an increasing importance and range from the classic publication of scientific papers and participation to events, to the realization of time-lapse video, the organization of a training at university, and the development of a game app to present project results in a fun way.

The project is focused on residential buildings, being the largest components of the European building stock, responsible for two-thirds of the building energy consumption and presenting the most complex ownership.

4RinEU provides a set of deep renovation packages composed by novel and already available technologies. Such deep renovation packages can be optimized according to different boundary conditions with five main objectives: energy savings, low environmental impact, users’ comfort, construction time and cost optimality.

The innovation of the project is linked to the systemic approach with a high degree of prefabrication and standardization of the renovation solution. This will allow the development of complex products, aimed at several functions and strongly connected to the building and the energy grid. Moreover, the technological developments will follow the market trend of assessing low intrusive, scalable and easy to install devices. In this way, 4RinEU guarantees the simplification of the planning process, the installation and maintenance of the solutions implemented, and to trigger the transformation of the installers sector from low-level jobs to highly skilled professions.

Thanks to 4RinEU, the European residential building industry can reduce the risks of construction failure in the planning phase and the related costs and the timing related to renovation process of a building. In addition to this, the solutions implemented within the project will produce significant energy savings and the optimization of the RES Integration in the buildings and energy grids.
http://4rineu.eu/

The expected impacts as listed in the GA addressed and are addressing the 4RinEU technology developments and deep renovation packages optimisation, for demo-cases, early adopters case-studies and archetypes. A structured framework (in MS Excel® environment) to monitor the achievement of the seven expected impacts is under development, considering different time-frames (short and long term), and different domains (from demo-cases to EU building stock). A set of specific indicators to calculate the impacts are organised the five thematic areas as identified in the project for supporting the deep renovation decision process: energy, IEQ, environment, building site management, economics. The work carried out up to M36 allows to be confident the foreseen impacts can be either achieved or being very closed.